Help me find a laptop

Lenovos have been my favorite for the past ten years or so. I currently have a U31-70 and I'm really happy with it. Just had to switch the audio driver because the default driver added compression. Couple of my friends have Lenovo Carbons and praise them a lot but they are just too expensive for me to buy for personal use.

 

The old ThinkPads were tough as fuck. I kept dropping them on the floor/ground, spilling Coke on them, etc and they kept on working.

I was in the same boat last month and wound up getting this dell. 2.8ghz dual core and a 128 gig ssd. I abused it before my two week return policy was up and it held up just fine. It reminds me of a netbook. It doesn't seem to make any noise.

  On 5/6/2016 at 3:06 PM, sweepstakes said:

 

I don't know how many cores I really need, or how much memory (I'm guessing 8 gigs is probably enough for what I'm doing?). Said Macbook is dual core 2.1 GHz w/ 4GB RAM so probably more than that, or maybe Snow Leopard is just really slow?

 

 

If you can upgrade your OS, you should, imo. Snow Leopard is ancient.

 

Other than that, my advice is to look for a laptop in a laptop store. I'm pretty sure you can find laptops in laptop stores :-P

Anyone know why Sony stopped making their lappys ? Still happy with my one 5 years on and other Sony machines I've used have always had such a lush/vibrant screen. However my current machine is *starting* to get a little slow (bottleneck being the GPU) and was gonna get a new Sony but looks like they gave up making them a while ago....

  On 6/24/2016 at 2:30 PM, mcbpete said:

Anyone know why Sony stopped making their lappys ? Still happy with my one 5 years on and other Sony machines I've used have always had such a lush/vibrant screen. However my current machine is *starting* to get a little slow (bottleneck being the GPU) and was gonna get a new Sony but looks like they gave up making them a while ago....

i didn't have much trouble finding them: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10006/vaio-to-start-selling-laptops-in-the-us-this-spring http://us.vaio.com/

 

anyways i had the exact opposite experience with my last vaio laptop (maybe 6-7 yrs old at most). was almost immediately severly slow, ran very hot and had an absolute shit screen. it also felt extremely cheap with the half magnesium alloy half plastic. it got me through my school classes at the time though. at this point i've handed it down to me mum and it's fine for her for now.

 

was looking to get a new zenbook but their most recent refresh mimics the new macbooks and offer shit for ports (like one usb-c and a headphone jack). i'd gladly carry an extra extra weight/thickness built into the board instead of needing an incredibly expensive usb-c splitter shit thing.

  On 6/24/2016 at 2:42 PM, juiceciuj said:

i didn't have much trouble finding them: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10006/vaio-to-start-selling-laptops-in-the-us-this-spring http://us.vaio.com/

Ah maybe they've just stopped them here in Europe, this is the happy happy news if I look for one here: http://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/computers/vaio-laptops

I still haven't pulled the trigger. I was set on a MBP for a long time and now I'm wondering if I should instead just get a 27" iMac so I have a nice big display for patching (which seems cooler than dual monitors to me), and a Chromebook for a portable I don't have to worry too much about losing or breaking. I really love the idea of the Chromebook and it seems like it'd be interesting (or at least novel, which might mean painful) to develop on/for that platform. Plus the models equipped with touchscreens can now use Android apps.

Or just buy a nice monitor and hook up virtually any laptop to it...

I think sony ditched the vaio's because they saw the tablet as the future and demand for laptops would disappear. Theres still a market for laptop's, vaio's were good ones, I guess sony just bailed because they saw a market decrease. I've got a sony z4 tablet which lets you attach a keyboard so you can get the laptop feeling, which is ok, but it's no substitute for a laptop if you want performance.

  On 6/24/2016 at 10:09 PM, Hodorsbn said:

Or just buy a nice monitor and hook up virtually any laptop to it...

Yeah but if you care about battery longevity, you end up repeatedly plugging in and unplugging the laptop as the charge dissipates and accrues. This is annoying enough to me to warrant a second machine. Further, the spec of the laptop is close to irrelevant if I'm just remoting into a more powerful desktop, especially one with virtualization support.

Fair point about the battery. Is remoting a viable option for creative work? I used it last about 5 years ago and found it unworkable for my needs (video graphics)

Oh yeah for video I bet it's terrible! I'd probably just be working with Max remotely (which also might suck), maybe some mundane web development software on a VM.

 

Another point about Chromebooks - I use Chrome more than any other application anyway, and they're obviously optimized for it.